Page 59 of Not Your Golden Boy

Nikky looked at her and swallowed. His instinct to keep quiet and get along was strong, but the burning need to confide in someone, someone who felt maternal, was too much to resist.

“I’ve got a stalker,” he said, voice hoarse, hands shaking.

“My poor boy,” Maggie said, coming forward to hug him at once.

“Is it that American outside?” Laura asked.

Nikky glanced to her, then back at Maggie, then nodded. “He’s been hounding me since Cooked became a success, trying to get me to either pay him off to go away or to feed him inside information on my costars that he can use to make money.”

“The bastard,” Maggie huffed.

“I…I sort of accepted the deal to record with Albion so I could run away to a different country to avoid him. But now recording is not going the way I want it to. And—” Nikky dropped his head, heat flaring in his face. This was the hardest part to admit. He sucked in a breath and straightened, facing the weird things he’d done so he could own them. “I hired Harry to pretend to be my boyfriend and to get caught with me in compromising situations so the fans would turn on me and leave me alone. But now I’ve fallen in love with him, and I don’t know what to do about it. Plus, I know there’s something he isn’t telling me, and it eats me up inside.”

He was shaking by the time he finished as the bundle of emotions he’d kept inside for too long unraveled. He shouldn’t have let it get tangled up so tightly to begin with, but now he couldn’t stop his tears from coming, not when Maggie and Laura felt exactly what mothers should feel like.

Laura took Nikky’s other hand. “It’s alright, love. But I think you’d better tell us the whole story.”

Nikky nodded and let his tears flow. She was absolutely right. It was about time he stopped bottling everything inside and told people what was going on so it couldn’t be used against him or Harry.

eighteen

​. . .​

Harry was on high alert from the moment he left his flat and headed down to the busy streets of Notting Hill. It would have been easy to hole up with Nikky at home, keeping his lover all to himself for as long as possible in the hopes of shielding him from what Holberg and Albion were doing. Ultimately, that would accomplish nothing.

The only way to truly keep Nikky safe was to fight back early and with strength.

The problem was that Harry didn’t know where to start. Albion was threatening to buy and distribute the video—and fuck, he wished Maggie and Laura had never put the idea out into the universe or that he hadn’t given in to Nikky’s request to make it because he was horny—but Holberg was the one who had stolen it. Both men were a danger, and since Harry only knew where one of them was, he headed back toward the Tube station with long, purposeful strides.

He hadn’t made it to the end of the street before he felt someone watching him. The sensation had the hair on the back of his neck standing up, but as much as he slowed his steps and searched the area, he couldn’t make out anyone who seemed to be focused on him with unusual intensity.

When he stopped at a streetcorner just across from the station, a quiet, confident, American voice spoke behind him with, “Walk on past the station. I’ll tell you when to turn and where to go.”

Harry whipped around despite the implied order to fake casualness, fury blazing from him. He balled his hands into fists and intended to tell the fucker off…but recognized the tall, blond man from the café.

His heart sank as too many details came together in his mind. Holberg. In the flesh. Come to dig the knife in deeper and get whatever it was he thought he could squeeze out of him.

“Why shouldn’t I call the police right here and now and have you arrested for stalking?” Harry growled, shocking a random pedestrian who stood waiting for the light with them. The woman moved on quickly when the light turned.

“Walk,” Holberg said with a smarmy grin.

“This isn’t fucking spy versus spy,” Harry snapped, even though he didn’t have much of a choice to do anything other than walk. If he wanted to get to the bottom of things and save Nikky from humiliation, he needed to keep this bastard as close as possible.

With a scowl that had people crossing from the other side of the street giving him a wide berth, Harry walked forward, Holberg falling into step next to him like they were two old friends touring one of London’s more eclectic neighborhoods.

“Let’s discuss terms,” Holberg said before Harry could formulate words vicious enough to tell the man what he thought of him.

“Let’s not,” Harry growled. “I’m not giving you anything. You’ll leave Nikky alone or I’ll bring your entire world down around you.”

Holberg laughed. “You don’t have the power to do that,” he snorted. “You don’t even have the power to stop your phone from being hacked. It was child’s play.”

Harry’s stomach twisted. Holberg was right in too many ways. It wasn’t going to stop him from doing absolutely everything he could to squash the bastard like a bug, though. Albion, too.

“I have more power than you think,” he bluffed.

Holberg sent him a sneering sideways look. “I’ll tell you what. Wire six hundred thousand dollars to my account and I’ll walk away, destroy the video, and you and Nikky will never hear from me again.”

Harry stopped. “You said five hundred thousand.”